Getting Started

I’ve gathered together a few of the articles I’ve posted that should hopefully he helpful if you are setting up a new Debian system particularly if like myself you would not rather just install everything, but want to build a minimal system with just the packages that are required for a functional system.Most of these pages assume that you are installing Debian 8.0 (jessie)I generally follow the same basic steps each time I set up a system.

Downloading

If you have a network connection than the easiest way to install Debian is to download the small CD or USB stick image that corresponds to you machines hardware. This will let you start the installation by booting from CD or USB and download the software packages from one of the Debian mirror sites.Back to top

Installing Debian

I prefer to do a minimal installation first and then add the packages I need later. If I’m building a dedicated server that I’m usually only ever going to access via ‘ssh’ then why install a complete Desktop environment?Back to top

Configuring

Having done a minimal installation I usually configure system so the package manager does not to install recommended packages, install ‘ssh’ so I can access the system remotely and copy files between systems using ‘scp’, then lock things down a bit using ‘ufw’ to set up the firewall rules using ‘iptables’. I also enable verbose startup messages so I can see what is happening as the system boots.

For legal reasons you may also want to set up a banner message to warn users that their activities may be monitored and that unauthorized access to the system is not permitted.

You also need to remember to enable root logins if you want to login as root using ‘ssh’ as it is disabled by default in recent releases.Back to top